Workshop “Social Business Modeling” with Professor Francesco Rullani, March first 2019
The second module of the Urban Clinic of LabGov EDU 2019 focuses his activities on social entrepreneurship. The module is composed by a workshop, carried out by Professor Francesco Rullani on the organization of social enterprises and social business modeling and a co-working session facilitated by Alessandro Piperno, an “Entrepreneurship Lab”.
The workshop on social business modeling was hosted on March 1st 2019, at the LUISS campus of Viale Romania and consisted in a lecture by Francesco Rullani. Francesco Rullani is Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship and Management of Innovation at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome (IT) and Coordinator of the ERSHub (the Hub for Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability).
Professor Rullani starts its presentation on “The Commons and Business models” with a discussion on the major philosophic and journalistic work of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Professor Rullani argues that the main message that we can take out of the book Is that within a hierarchical regime there is a detachment between the task that one must carry out (the order to be executed) and what one does to concretely carry out the task. The banality of evil is represented by the fact that, within the totalitarian regime, the approach of the people towards their actions was de-humanized. The human dimension was banalized until it disappeared, and so was the perception of the true meaning of the action.
The lecture then moves towards Milgram experiment on human behavior that was carried out in the aftermath of the Eichmann process in Jerusalem (1961) A social psychology experiment conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, it measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure that was instructing them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience, for instance violent acts. They had to administer electric shocks to a subject to which they were posing questions. For every wrong answer, the voltage of the electric shock increased gradually, until they reached levels that would have been fatal. The electric shocks were unreal (the learners were in fact Milgram’s collaborators). The experiment highlighted the role played by obedience to authority in a closed and hierarchical system.
The learning point is that life in social systems is filled with coercive systems that impose and nudge behaviors. And such systems are stronger than the community ties, because they have the capacity and the strength to absorb individuals’ responsibilities. The two main systems are the State and the Market.
Those systems solve their problems through bureaucracy (the State) and transactions (the Market). The systems are designed to reproduce mechanisms on which they are based and to expand their sphere of action. f you ask the bureaucracy to solve a problem, it will do it by producing procedures, while if you ask a community to solve a problem it will produce responsibilities. The social sector (in Italy, the third sectors) is mainly composed by communities regulated by systems based on responsibilities. Those systems solve their problems through bureaucracy (the State) and transactions (the Market). The systems are designed to reproduce mechanisms on which they are based and to expand their sphere of action. f you ask the bureaucracy to solve a problem, it will do it by producing procedures, while if you ask a community to solve a problem it will produce responsibilities. The social sector (in Italy, the third sectors) is mainly composed by communities regulated by systems based on responsibilities.
A key issue with the social sector is though economic sustainability. There is in fact often a tension between the creation of economic value and the normative foundations of such communities and this tension is one of the factor hampering the production of value in social enterprises. Other factors hampering the access to value production in social enterprises could be, for instance, the lack of access to credit warranty (which could be solved through the creation of collaborative and solidarity networks between social entrepreneurs) or the lack of skills. The social enterprises therefore often comes out with hybrid solutions, hybrid practices that allow them to use their productive capacity by integrating marginalized subjects and pursuing the social good. Example in Italy is the case of “Made in Carcere” (made in prison). The project consists in laboratories of construction with waste materials. In the labs, learning and facilitation to enable access to capital, skills and distribution for the access to the final market are provided. This is a case of a social enterprise that produce a positive impact both socially and environmentally by working against the sense of not being the creator of one’s life that affects an individual when she/he is in prison. By giving them access to such opportunity, they cease to be prisoners and begin to be workers responsible for what they produce and for what they do.